(Poets&Quants) — In an old furniture factory in San Francisco’s Mission District, you’ll find the headquarters of budding financial tech startup Earnest. Founded by Harvard MBA Louis Beryl and finance vet Benjamin Hutchinson in 2013, Earnest aims to disrupt the student loan financing market, a business that has already seen Stanford and Wharton MBA startups establish a lead in the field with SoFi and CommonBond, respectively.

Earnest is undaunted by the competition. Beryl and company have already raised $32 million in two rounds of venture backing—their latest Series A round, which closed at the end of January, garnered $17 million and a flurry of media attention.

Alan Cooper, head of communications at Earnest, discusses the company’s growth and the struggles that come with it. He talks about how the company has grown from 40 employees to 75 since he was hired in January and how it’s nearly impossible to nail down office space large enough in the overheated Mission real estate market. Median commercial and residential rent in the Mission has been soaring, even above the outlandish city averages. Right now, Earnest has three separate spaces as it frantically searches for one central location.

The current space is typical of a Bay Area-based startup—a couple of large rooms with some couches and many Apple-littered desks. Cooper kindly asks a couple of 20-somethings with MacBooks to scram from the couches to make room for a meeting and the purpose of Poets&Quants’ visit—to get to know the seven MBA interns Earnest has hired for the summer.

The interns come from a Who’s Who of the business school elite—Harvard, Wharton, Booth, and nearby Stanford all for the same basic purpose—to learn more about fin-tech and what it’s like to work at a Bay Area startup.

The geography and culture of the area is in itself enough for them to get the gist of the scene. Earnest’s office sits next door to Lyft and down the street from Mission Cliffs—an indoor rock climbing and workout gym where fixed-gear bikes are crammed into an overflowing set of bike racks.

The interns are your typical 20-something MBA students from top business schools. The only sign of school rivalry surfaces when Gideon Silverman, a Stanford student, boasts that “Stanford is the greatest incubator in the world” and venture backing behind Stanford startups would be “one of the largest economies in the world.” Saagar Kulkarni, a Harvard MBA, was quick to defend his school’s entrepreneurial prowess, as was Megan Terraforte from Wharton.

All of the interns either come from the East Coast or another country. They’ve worked for McKinsey, Bain, Google, Salesforce, New York Life, and JP Morgan. And they are among a fast-growing cohort of MBAs seeking summer internships at early-stage ventures.

“Interest in interning at a startup is definitely increasing,” says Kristen Fitzpatrick, managing director of career and professional development at Harvard Business School. Fitzpatrick predicted the majority of Harvard first-years could be at startups, based on a Harvard survey that’s received a 67% response rate so far. “I would say it’s more of a 10-year phenomenon that continues to increase. We are still in the process of gathering this summer’s data but I think about 600 out of 900 MBAs went to work at a startup this summer.”

Startup demand for MBA talent is also rising. At Wharton, job postings from startups have gone from 130 three years ago to 400 in the past year.

That two-thirds of Harvard’s first-year class would opt to intern at a startup over the likes of McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Google, Amazon, Procter & Gamble, and General Electric is a wildly ambitious bet on the future. Summer internships at those blue chip companies are virtually required to get a full-time job offer after graduation. Looking askance at those opportunities is to limit one’s options at graduation. The sea change in MBA internship preferences speaks to the confidence of forthcoming graduates in the economy and the job market but also to changing ideas of what bright, young professionals want out of their careers.

Increasingly, the current generation of MBAs wants to see meaningful impact in their early careers. They want quicker access to the C-suite. They want to learn in new and uncomfortable settings. And a small, early-stage startup can satisfy all of those desires. But above all, they want to absorb as much as they can about every aspect of running a business, often in the hopes of someday launching their own startups.

“A lot of students are thinking about experimenting and doing something quite different with their summers,” Harvard’s Fitzpatrick says. “The opportunity to jump in and roll up their sleeves is really attractive.”

Eva Wei, a Wharton student, worked for JPMorgan before pursuing her MBA and is now in a marketing role at Earnest. Kulkarni, who is working in the “office of the CEO” at Earnest, had done a stint at Bain & Company. Silverman, who is working in capital markets at the startup, had been at McKinsey. Terraforte, who is busy developing partnerships for Earnest, was at New York Life, and Harvard Business School’s Sabina Robinov, who is doing risk assessment this summer, has a resume stamped by Intel and Google.

The opportunity to do hands-on work from the get-go in the heart of the Bay Area startup scene is alluring to MBAs. Terraforte, who spent her early career in traditional work environments, says there has been “implicit trust” of the interns from the very beginning at Earnest. She says the casual dress code and the fact that it’s okay to show up to work “after 7:59 a.m.” are huge pluses. Meanwhile, she says, some of her classmates spending the summer with traditional companies are “flying every night” and “at work all the time.”

Robinov says getting to work with passionate, young entrepreneurs has been a major benefit of interning at a startup. “If someone who looks over 35 walks in, you know they are an investor,” she says, drawing laughs from her fellow interns. “Most of the people my roommates are working with this summer are old—except the interns.”

On Terraforte’s second day of work, she was wondering who was the guy wasting time going around and asking everyone individually what they did for the weekend. She soon learned that guy was the company’s co-founder and CEO.

After graduating from Princeton and working for Morgan Stanley, Beryl pursued an MBA at Harvard. He couldn’t find anyone other than himself to foot the bill, and his savings weren’t large enough to pay for the degree out of pocket.

“I thought I was living financially responsibly,” Beryl says. “I had a 401k going, I was paying bills on time, had good jobs, a good education, and was going to grad school at Harvard. But I still needed private student loans to pay for that education. School was expensive, and I didn’t want to liquidate all of my 401k.”

Despite having good credit and savings, Beryl needed his mom to co-sign his student loans. “We refinanced my mom’s house, and she lent me that money,” Beryl says. “I paid her back each month and I still continue to pay her back. The massive problem was, as a borrower, I was low risk, but the lenders viewed me as high risk.”

So Beryl and Hutchinson came up with another way to evaluate borrowers—they used big data. Earnest uses an algorithm and 80,000 to 100,000 data points to lend money to students with little to no credit history. The startup reevaluates creditworthiness but also takes into account digital bank statements, credit cart history, and work pay stubs.

“What we look for is measurements of responsibility,” Beryl says. “Is your cash flow positive? Are you living within your means? Are you not accumulating a lot of credit card debt and paying bills on time? Are you not over-drafting your bank account?”

While competitors CommonBond and SoFi began their businesses with a focus on top business schools, Earnest will fund or refinance nearly anything that is considered education, from elite MBAs, to accredited undergraduate schools, and, most recently, coding bootcamps. Earnest also services the loans themselves instead of using a third-party provider.

But for the interns, what makes working at Earnest special isn’t just its “next generation” banking techniques—it’s about being a critical part of a culture that embraces change and impact. “It’s not about ping pong tables and free lunches,” Beryl insists. “It’s about truly making the world a better place.”

Terraforte, who has been working in partnerships at Earnest this summer, concurs. “I wanted to make an impact and add real value. And at a startup you don’t have an option not to do that,” she says.

Certainly there is little reason for the Goliaths of business to fear losing out on top talent. After all, there will always be intelligent and driven people—particularly those with huge student loans—looking to build careers at established companies. But the influx of interest in startups among top MBAs is changing the way career services departments are spending time and resources at business schools.

Fitzpatrick says recruiting by startups for Harvard students is year-round. Her office has made efforts to get small startups on campus as well as providing opportunities for students to travel to the Bay Area. “A lot of them [small startups] don’t have the budgeting and recruiting that larger companies have, so we make it easier and free for the organization to come on campus,” she says.

According to Fitzpatrick, career management staff at Harvard will do everything from extensive internet research—often using SpotRocket—to exhausting alumni lists to make connections for students with startups. After identifying a few target companies, Fitzpatrick says her staff trains students to pitch the value of having an MBA candidate as a summer intern.

Wharton is also helping its students connect with startups. “Unlike other schools, we have a specific model with dedicated individuals to startups in terms of relationships and placements,” says Michelle Hopping, director of employer services at Wharton’s Career Management Center.

Hopping says her office has recently created marketing collateral and cheat sheets with info about what MBA students can do for early stage startups. “Not all startups are at a point where they see much need for MBAs or they are not built on people coming from that background,” she explains. “We are really working at helping the West Coast startup understand what they can get from a Wharton student.”

Still, according to Beryl, career management offices could be doing more. “If I were dean of HBS for this one project, I would start creating long-term metrics of success,” Beryl says. “The real goal should be how many people are in the same job two years in as when they started. If your metric of success is job placement and average income, you are incentivized to funnel students into investment banks and consulting firms.”

Hopping says that students coming back from startup internships with positive results. “It’s individual for each student but there are some broad things I’m hearing,” she says. “One of the words we always hear from students before and after is impact; the ability for a student to feel they are making a tangible impact so when they come out of it they can look back and say they accomplished the goal.

“The second thing is passion. They are also getting exposure into what it’s really like at an early stage venture and for better or for worse, learning what it takes.”

A boot camp pitch to get an MBA in China

(Poets&Quants) — Hurtling into Shanghai at more than 200 miles per hour on a bullet train to attend a pre-MBA boot camp at a leading Chinese business school gave international participants a striking welcome to China’s breathtaking ascendance. And for the boot campers—mostly Asians, Americans, Latin Americans, and Europeans—the first lecture was a revelation of just how different China is.

“China is not ready for democracy,” professor Bala Ramasamy tells the boot campers at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). Ramasamy, a Chinese citizen of Malaysian origin, and a lively lecturer, notes that a number of Asian countries saw economic growth under dictators, including the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesia’s Suharto, and China’s Chiang Kai Shek, who oversaw significant economic growth.

“When you come to this part of the world our definition of a dictator may be different than yours,” Ramasamy says. “I would prefer a dictator any time, a good one, because leadership, yes, is important—but it need not be a democratically elected leader. I have to defend China. Our definition of human rights is different. Human rights is survival. Human rights is getting out of poverty. If a dictator can take us out of poverty, then our human rights are actually getting better.”

Not all of China ready for democracy: Prof

Ramasamy’s assertion raised eyebrows around the lecture hall, particularly among the several Guatemalan participants, whose experience of dictatorship, as one woman pointed out to Ramasamy, was far from positive.

Research has shown that democracy will only last if GDP exceeds $6,000 per capita, Ramasamy says. “Shanghai is ready for democracy, but Guizhou is not,” Ramasamy says. “When we talk about political reforms in China, political reforms will move as fast as the slowest province in China. We have to wait for Guizhou to reach a certain level of development, then we can talk about democracy.”

In fact, as the boot camp was wrapping up, China was throwing more than 100 human rights lawyers and activists into prison on allegations of organizing illegal paid protests. But to be sure, the Chinese Communist Party has overseen remarkable economic progress, with the GDP growing at 10.6% in 2010, then shrinking slightly over the following years to 7.4% last year—still a high number, particularly compared to the 2.4% in the U.S. And China has cut its level of extreme poverty to single-digit realms from 84% in 1980. Over the past 20 years, life expectancy has gone up five years to 75. Disposable income has risen to $4,670 this year from $1,250 in 2006, a 270% increase.

For international students, getting an MBA from a Chinese business school provides unique opportunities—entry into a 1.3 billion-person economy, for example—and poses considerable challenges—such as trying to say “forecasting the aggregate directly” in Mandarin.

Boot camp features lectures, company visits

Sixty-eight early career professionals from a wide spectrum of fields attended the five-day CEIBS boot camp July 8-12, conducted in English as is the international MBA program. The chance to experience China and learn about business and business school there cost $1,264, with lodging in upscale campus housing included. Participants attended four lectures from CEIBS professors on campus, and each boot camper visited two of four major global companies.

“For me, the idea of trying to commit to something halfway around the world, you want to get some taste of it before you commit to it,” says participant William Armstrong, 29, of Houston, who has a BS in finance from Texas A&M. “I’d heard about CEIBS before—I lived in Beijing for about a year. It seems like the best program currently in China, and I’ve been wanting to find a way to move back here. If I decide to do an MBA I think I’ll probably come here, it’s just a question of if I decide to do an MBA.”

The CEIBS campus in ShanghaiPhoto by Ethan Baron

The campus, built in 1999, and designed in the manner of a traditional Chinese garden by the famed Chinese architect who designed the glass pyramid at the Louvre, I. M. Pei, sits on 20 acres just outside central Shanghai, and features more than an acre of reflecting pools and its own glass pyramid. The new portion of the school was completed last year. About 80% of first-year MBA students, including internationals, live in on-campus dorms.

Shanghai, population 24 million-plus, houses in more than 120 skyscrapers 500 feet or higher the offices and regional headquarters for dozens of major global and Chinese firms. The country’s financial hub, it has the highest per-capital disposable income in China. “Shanghai will eventually become a Hong Kong or Singapore,” assistant director of marketing Roy Chason tells boot camp participants.
The CEIBS MBA typically takes 18 months, but the school added this year an accelerated 12-month MBA that front-loads electives but leaves less time for career development and extracurriculars. “If you need to find a job you need to be in this 18-month program,” MBA director Simin Chen tells boot campers on the first day. “If you’re company sponsored, or in a family business, or if you don’t want to work, 12 months.”

At the boot camp, a recruiting mechanism for the CEIBS international MBA program, lecturers hit participants with one dominant message: opportunity.

“The most important factor of change in the 21st Century is what I call the Chinese Renaissance,” professor David Gosset, a Parisian and the school’s foremost China expert, tells participants. “China is already a global power. Everything China does has a global impact. China is regaining a position of centrality. China is reshaping the world in which we live.”

Gosset cites an estimate from former Rand Corporation analyst and U.S. presidential adviser Michael Pillsbury, who predicts China’s economy will double the size of America’s by 2049. China’s evolution will include a focus on effective governance, but “don’t expect liberal democracy,” Gosset advises. “The most important organization in China is, of course, the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party is here to stay, to lead the change, for the foreseeable future. What we have in Europe and the U.S. is not a model for them,” Gosset says.

China key player in global commerce

The Chinese economy makes up more than 10% of the world economy; the country is the major trading partner of Russia, India, Brazil, and Africa as a whole, Gosset says, noting that the West is not an intermediary in that commerce. “We now live in a world where the South/South relations are as important as the North/South relations,” Gosset says.

CEIBS MBAs can find career opportunities within China, or in companies trading with China, Chason tells participants.

“Things are changing extremely rapidly,” Chason says. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Regionally where do I put my eggs?’ You have to look away from the short term and immediate trends and see in the long term where things are going, because it’s going to affect your career.
“China will affect your career, significantly, and probably your life.”

Of course, in nearly every major city around the world, China has a presence. It projects itself through a collection of vectors: goods, technology, people, finance, culture, its military, and diplomacy, Gosset says. “China is already a network of networks whose reach is already global,” Gosset says.

To succeed in many areas of global business, therefore, knowledge and experience of China is necessary, MBA director Chen tells participants. “With this, you have very much an advantage,” Chen says.

Case method teaching with a focus on China

The CEIBS international MBA uses the case method, and is built around a core curriculum very similar to top those in top U.S. MBA programs, Chen says. “We blend this international knowledge with China practice in a way that nobody can match us,” Chen says. “Many of our faculty members come with a U.S. background. Our curriculum was originally modeled after Wharton’s.”

As in elite U.S. programs, CEIBS students undertake in their second year an experiential learning course, working in groups to solve strategic issues for companies that in the past have included Dow DOW, Bayer, BP BP, Siemens, MasterCard MA, Nike NKE, and Coca-Cola KO.

Also in the second year, and also similar to programs in top U.S. schools, CEIBS offers for the fall term an international exchange program with about 30 partner schools, including Wharton, the U.C. Berkeley Haas School, UCLA’s Anderson School, Duke’s Fuqua, Michigan’s Ross, the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler, Indiana’s Kelley, and Dartmouth’s Tuck, along with European institutions such as London Business School, Spain’s ESADE and IESE, France’s HEC and INSEAD, plus other schools including the Indian School of Business, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Canada’s Queen’s, Rotman, Sauder, and Schulich schools.

Elective courses provide opportunities for concentration in finance, marketing, or entrepreneurship, and 30 to 50 students per year take a one-week elective course overseas, last year in Japan, France, and the U.S. This year the course will send students to South Korea, Japan, Israel, France, and the U.S.

Last year, CEIBS added an entrepreneurship concentration. At CEIBS and other top business schools, few MBAs start businesses right out of school, but around a third do within 15 years, says entrepreneurship professor Rama Velamuri. Faculty encourage students to pursue ventures if they’re passionate, but Velamuri warns that the Chinese market has become more difficult. “In the early stages of China’s economic miracle, there were lots of what I call open spaces … where entrepreneurs could move in and start ventures—15-20 years ago,” Velamuri says. “Nowadays, I would say that most of the gaps in the market have been filled. There are relatively fewer low-hanging fruit. No matter what industry you enter you are likely to find competitors, especially local competitors.”

Local partners recommended for China startups

Because of the challenges for international entrepreneurs working in Chinese markets, CEIBS recommends finding a local co-founder, “somebody who can provide you with the access to local resources, who can provide you with a deep understanding of the local contexts, who can help you overcome language barriers,” Velamuri says.

Nevertheless, the entrepreneurship environment is very favorable in certain areas, Velamuri says. “In China there are large sectors of the economy where there are hardly any barriers to startups. Especially in technology, it’s very easy. By and large the sectors that youngsters are typically interested in in China and generally I would say in emerging markets are quite friendly from a regulatory perspective.”

During the boot camp, which is in its third year, lectures highlighted career opportunities within China for international MBA graduates. Both the government and private sectors boast massive cash reserves, and the rapidly growing consumer class is hungry for Western- and Chinese-made goods, Chason says. The country’s chemical and energy sectors are booming, and auto production exceeds that of the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined, Chason says, noting that BMW, Nissan, and Ford F recruited at CEIBS last year, as did Honeywell Aerospace. Most major consulting firms also recruit at CEIBS, Chason says.
Emergence of Chinese brands combined with growing consumption, along with rapid development of the country’s interior, large investments in the tech sector, and a highly diversified economy are promoting job growth in the country for MBAs, Chason says, while China’s massively increasing outward investment and hunger for natural resources provides out-of-country opportunities in Chinese firms—and in companies in joint ventures with Chinese companies or trading with China, which in 2013 surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest trading nation.

Boot campers visit McKinsey in Shanghai

On a visit to global consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Shanghai, boot campers hear from associate Jerry Ding that the Chinese tech market is expanding massively, as are internet-delivered financial services. Also, a widespread problem in industry with waste—of time, inventory, labor, and emissions—provides a great deal of work for consulting companies in China, Ding says. And the country’s emerging middle class presents a massive target for companies operating in the country, Ding says. “We see that they have sufficient share, they have sufficient disposable income,” Ding says. “What is the best way to capture them is really a big question mark for our clients.”

In hiring international MBAs, including CEIBS graduates, McKinsey in China heavily weights problem-solving ability, along with leadership experience, applicants’ personal impacts, and applicants’ history of “driving and achieving,” McKinsey’s Greater China Office recruiting manager Mike Wang says during the company visit. “Problem solving is really the foundation of everything we’re looking for,” Wang says, adding that with that ability, a dearth of leadership experience or lower marks in other parameters may be overlooked, but without it, any chance for a job evaporates. “McKinsey’s way of solving problems will not only make you survive within the company, but give you the edge, the competitive edge, when working in other companies,” Wang says.

Back at the school, CEIBS alumnus and school career development consultant Jeff Pi addresses the recent abrupt fall in China’s stock market, and urges boot campers to look beyond specific events to “overall megatrends” in the country. “We lost 10 Greek economies. You can be a pessimist and say, ‘Ah look, the bubble’s bursting,’ or you can look at it from an opportunistic point of view,” Pi says.

Among the megatrends are the urbanization of a billion people; huge manufacturing scale; the rising consumer class; large amounts of money and brainpower among the population and industries; and internet commerce, Pi says. Pi notes that Facebook took a decade to reach the billion-user mark, while Chinese mobile-communication app startup WeChat hit 600 million after only four years. “This is the kind of explosive growth that we’re talking about,” Pi says.

Pi points to the health care sector—“a lot of people smoke, (there’s) a lot of diabetes, everybody’s aging”—as an area of major opportunity, particularly with regard to e-commerce, in which health care companies are setting up new digital strategy departments. “There’s a huge market potential,” Pi says. “These are things that are happening for the first time. These are things where nobody around you is an expert. That could be you guys. Nobody is going to say, ‘I’m an expert in e-commerce health,’ because there is nobody.”

Investment products, data analytics needed, alumnus says

Also, the population’s large cash reserves—average savings rate among citizens is 50%—raise a dire need for investment opportunities, Pi says. “There’s very few products in which people can invest,” Pi says, adding that swelling e-commerce produces strong consumer data, boosting the need for experts in data analytics.

Risk management is also a growing field, with companies needing to carefully manage growth, Pi says. “Real CFOs are going to be in demand,” Pi says.

The new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which aims to rival the IMF and World Bank, and to connect 17 Asian countries with a high-speed rail network, will start hiring in September, and need many public relations and government relations experts, Pi says. “For Chinese people with international exposure, or for international people with China exposure, this is where you have your advantage,” Pi says.

While CEIBS pitches opportunity to the boot campers, it also puts forward some of the challenging realities facing international MBAs, even graduates of respected Chinese schools, should they wish to work in China.

Number one, it can be hard to find a job. “You really have to demonstrate you can bring (more) unique value to an organization than Chinese students,” says MBA director Chen. “It takes much more effort to find appropriate positions.”

Most want to stay, half succeed

Eighty per cent of CEIBS’ international grads express interest in working in China after graduating, but, says MBA director of Admissions and Career Services Yvonne Li, “the successful staying rate is 50%.” Sometimes a job goes to a Chinese-speaking applicant, or expectations between the applicant and employer don’t fit, or the foreign MBA isn’t attracted by the salary, Li says. Most of the international students who do find work in China end up in jobs not requiring Mandarin, Chason notes.

International MBAs, particularly Americans, tend to have stronger soft skills—in communications, teamwork, and dealing with people—than Chinese students, which can provide an edge, Chen says. “If you can convince these companies these qualities, plus your China experience, brings them value, I think they will hire you,” Chen says.

CEIBS students study in the library.Photo by Ethan Baron

In 2014, 43% of CEIBS’ 189 MBA graduates were from overseas, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, with 10 students from the U.S. and two from Canada. Nearly 80% of international MBA graduates go on to work in Asia, MBA director Chen says. CEIBS’ 2014 MBA Career Report shows that while the median salary for foreign grads working in mainland China topped that of the median for Mainland Chinese grads—$57,600—it was only $61,600. Median salaries for graduates working outside Mainland China were much higher, at $100,000 for Mainland Chinese grads and $86,500 for overseas grads.

According to global consulting firm Mercer’s 2015 cost of living ranking, Shanghai has the sixth-highest cost of living in the world this year, up four places from last year; Beijing has the seventh-highest, also up four places, and Shenzhen and Guangzhou are at 14th and 15th most expensive, both up a number of places from 2014—making all those cities more expensive than New York City.

Ethnic Chinese from U.S. have an edge

Half of CEIBS U.S. students are ethnic Chinese, an asset for obtaining jobs in China, Li notes. “They have that international perspective and they speak the local language. They will bring more value even than local Chinese,” Li says.

International students are offered Chinese language classes in their first year. Language poses a hurdle for foreign MBA job seekers in China who don’t speak good Chinese, Li says. “China is no longer the market of 10 years ago, (in which) expats were so popular, and easily find a job,” Li says. Most of the hiring, including that by multinationals, is for local operations, and even if Mandarin fluency isn’t overtly required, speakers have a decided advantage, Li says.

But the school’s career services staff devotedly pursue job opportunities all over the world for CEIBS MBAs, Li says. More than half of international grads find work via the careers department, Li says. “CEIBS, the school, is like nurturing a fishing pool,” Li says. “Fish are career opportunities, screened by career services. For our international students there are other fish through other channels.”

Channels provided by the school include mentorship, help from faculty, and job fairs, but for MBA students, making connections among faculty, peers, and industry representatives is vital, Li says. “To find opportunities you have to start networking from day one and use all the resources that we have,” Li says. “You have to build the relationships. This is true globally but I would say more so in China, so they can trust you.

“Some of our international students, if they’re not aggressively reaching out and building that network and exposing to the business community, and only leveraging very narrow resources, they might lose their dream.”

CEIBS grad networks her way into multinational

Indian graduate Ranjeeta Rai’s post-education career result shows the benefit of networking. A former banker, she’s now regional category manager in the Shanghai office of Henkel, a German multinational company whose products include Loctite adhesive, Dial soap, and Right Guard antiperspirant. “If you look at the outcome of the MBAs, for most of us it means a good job,” Rai tells boot campers on their visit to the Henkel office. “I just met somebody from Henkel at a networking event at CEIBS. I said I was looking for a job and he said he was looking for somebody. Some of you could be apprehensive. Will you get a job, will you get an internship? I got both.”

Career services director Li says that for overseas students, understanding the ways of China is also key to finding a job there. “They need to keep an open mind, with eagerness to learn new things and understand this culture … be open to everything, the food, the culture, the people, and to try their best to learn and to understand. Sometimes I do find there are different ways of communication and people may misunderstand each other.”

CEIBS entrepreneurship professor Rama VelamuriPhoto by Ethan Baron

While local hiring by multinationals has been flat, companies’ hiring under leadership development programs in China is is increasing, Li says. “They recruit MBA students or graduates from all the top business schools. They need talents who can understand this market,” Li says.

China’s rapid growth carries perils for MBAs set on careers there. In his lecture to boot campers, Gosset highlights future risks that need to be carefully managed. “The price China is paying for a rapid economic rise is huge in terms of natural degradation,” Gosset says. A truly independent judicial system is also required for China fight corruption that endangers its advance, Gosset says. More investment in education and a social safety net are also required, Gosset says.

Big country, big population, big problems

And the health system costs related to smoking and diabetes are not the only problems that will affect China’s ability to maintain a healthy and productive population at an affordable cost. “How do you ensure that a health care system is going to handle 1.4 billion people when half the population is more than 50?” Ramasamy tells boot camp participants. “You can imagine how much that is going to cost.”

Although the government asserts that 90% of the population has health insurance, massive health problems loom. Bain & Company partner Norbert Hueltenschmidt told the BBC last year that China faces major health care issues with its aging population, environmental problems, levels of access to health care, and sedentary living—physical activity has dropped 45% since 1990. “Paradigm shifts” are required for the government to invest in preventative health care, and for people to take better care of themselves, Hueltenschmidt says. “Health has to become the new wealth,” he says. That shift in priorities would bring business opportunities for many sectors, within China and in international trade, Hueltenschmidt says.

The huge growth in wealth generated by China’s explosive progress also presents a risk that the country will go the way of Japan, which has suffered from a 40-year recession in which the economy has failed to grow even 1% over the past 20 years, Ramasamy tells boot camp participants. Japan’s massive economic growth and expanding wealth of the 1980s produced a new generation of Japanese who were more interested in holidays and air conditioning than working hard and coming up with new products, Ramasamy suggests. In China, the same energetic entrepreneurship is alive in China now as it was in Japan in the ‘80s, Ramasamy says.

CEIBS boot campers take photos of Shanghai from the McKinsey office.Photo by Ethan Baron

“This spirit of entrepreneurship is burning,” Ramasamy says. “People don’t want to become poor again. The question is, will China be like Japan where the next-generation Chinese are going to be like this new-generation Japanese? With the new generation of Chinese, when you have kind of grown up in an environment where … life is easy, life is good, you get what you want, and you don’t have to work very hard, will this new generation of Chinese have this current level of entrepreneurship? This is going to be one of those challenges. Can China continue to grow? Will the spirit of entrepreneurship continue to burn in the next generation of Chinese, or will we follow this Japanese model and just take it easy?”

Ramasamy believes that because labor is no longer as cheap in China as it once was—hourly manufacturing wages have risen 12% a year since 2001, according to The Economist—productivity gains are China’s only hope for growth. “Productivity in China is still relatively low,” Ramasamy says.

Freedom to speak, on campusAt CEIBS, a non-profit joint venture between the Chinese government commerce department and the European Commission, professors and students have the liberty to speak their opinions in the classroom, says the marketing department’s Chason. “It’s quite separate from the other public universities,” Chason says. “Dialog is completely free within this campus. A lot of the Chinese professors tend to be sometimes more critical than the foreign professors.” Adds MBA director Chen: “You’re not supposed to say, ‘Overthrow the Communist government’ (but) you can criticize government policy without a question.”

Toward the end of the boot camp, participant Geena Maharaja, a 24-year-old product marketing specialist from Minnesota who’s planning an MBA, says she was hesitant to come to CEIBS, because she’s never been abroad for a long period. “I applied on a whim, and I looked more into it and I saw that this was a very serious program, a serious school,” Maharaja says. “Now I’m thinking of spreading my wings and going to do (an MBA) internationally. This program has shown me that’s an option.”

The Top Executive MBAs in the Class of 2015

(Poets&Quants) — You wouldn’t expect Scott Gates, 33, to have had time for an Executive MBA program. The president and COO of Western Window Systems, Gates was grappling with a challenging transformation. Four years ago, his company was another “sleepy, 50-year-old window and door manufacturer.” Since then, the firm’s revenues have increased more than six-fold by smartly building on a reputation for quality and service with new products and robust marketing. That kind of progress would delight most executives, but Gates still felt that some formal business training would prepare him for the company’s next challenge. “I knew that someday I wanted to be a CEO,” he tells Poets&Quants. “And I also knew that I needed to grow in several areas of business before I would be ready.”

Today Gates is, in fact, taking the reins as CEO of his company. To prepare for the role, he had enrolled in the executive MBA program at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business in 2013. His toughest lesson? Pinpointing his personal limitations. “You learn quickly that you will never be an expert in all of the various subjects,” Gates points out. “An MBA exposes you to all of the different components of business. However, it also highlights for you just how much help you will need to succeed at the highest levels.”

The EMBA program was an endurance test for Gates, stretching him to set priorities and focus in the moment. “The difficult part of business school is the sacrifices you end up being forced to make with your family,” Gates adds. “We all enter the program with busy careers and social lives, and then we inject 20 to 30 hours of homework and 16 hours of classroom time … and the only way we can accommodate the new demands is by making sacrifices in droves.”

In the end, it was worth it for Gates. “It is not an exaggeration to say that my MBA has fundamentally changed the way I look at and approach business. I am much more prepared, and much more confident regarding the unique challenges of running a $100 million business.”

Gates is one of Poets&Quants’ 30 most exceptional executive MBA graduates from the class of 2015. Unlike full-time MBA students, executives who gain an executive version of the degree must balance work and family with an often grueling educational load. Gaining the degree, and the confidence that comes with it, is no easy task. This inaugural feature from Poets&Quants spotlights the best-and-brightest EMBAs who’ve differentiated themselves from their peers. And this year’s group is as diverse as it is distinguished.

For starters, you’ll find nearly as many physicians, attorneys, and researchers on the list as you will C-suite executives. As you’d expect, men outnumber women on the list, but the 17-to-13 margin points to an increase in the number and quality of women pursuing leadership roles in business. More surprisingly, several “best-and-brightest” EMBAs are earning their MBAs in their 50s – a trend that signifies the flexibility of the format as much as it foreshadows lengthening career spans and changing business dynamics that require more adaptive skills.

To compile its list of outstanding EMBAs, Poets&Quantsextended invitations to 60 of the top-ranked EMBA programs (including 12 programs from outside the United States) to submit one nominee who exemplified the best of their respective schools. In the end, 37 schools returned nominations, with Poets&Quants evaluating candidates on their professional achievements, academic prowess, and personal narratives.

When the general public thinks of executive MBAs, they often picture thirty- and forty-something executives taking weekend classes (on the company dime) to prep them for the next promotion. That model is largely a reflection of the past. No doubt, you’ll find EMBAs from Goldman Sachs and big pharma on the list. But increasingly, you will also discover students who are paying their own way, working for smaller to mid-sized companies, and eager to try their hand at a startup.

Take Father Pete McCormick, 38, the director of the campus ministry at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his EMBA at the school’s Mendoza College of Business. Why would a priest need a business degree? For McCormick, leadership skills enhanced his ability to serve his community. What’s more, he says the training made him less risk averse, replacing gut instincts with quantitative analysis in evaluating challenges. Even more, his interactions with students provided inspiration, reminding him of the bigger picture. “If you get caught up in all that needs to be done, things become overwhelming very quickly,” he says. “There will be times when there are struggles, but always remember why you chose this path and be willing to sacrifice on its behalf.”

Another top EMBA graduate, UCLA’s Derek Herrera, 31, is no stranger to sacrifice. In 2012, he was left paralyzed from the waist down, taking a bullet while serving as a Marine Captain in Afghanistan. Aided by an exoskeleton that enables him to walk, Herrera earned his MBA at Anderson and has used the degree to launch his own business. He credits his peers for his success, quoting the school’s admissions director that “it takes diamonds to polish diamonds.”

“No matter what your title is or what industry you work in, you will be required to work in a team or interact with consumers and clients in a professional manner,” Herrera notes. “At the end of the day, individual skills are only a portion of what is required to be successful in business. Personal relationships and teamwork play a very important role in any company and I am very happy that the MBA program forces every student to grow in this area.”

But these nominees are just the tip of the iceberg. Want to know the caliber of professionals on campus these days? Duke’s Peter Saba, 54, boasts a Supreme Court victory as a corporate counsel. Penn State’s Steve Ettinger, 55, who earned his classmates’ respect for his insightfulness and helping hand, is ranked among the country’s top doctors, And the University of Chicago’s Sebastian Cerezo Montañez, 39, has already founded a leading independent M&A house and served as CEO of two companies, before he turned 40.

But it is how many of these students performed once they entered their programs that made them the best in their classes. MIT’s Ashley Sager, 32, and Purdue’s Stacey Mueller, 47, were celebrated by their classmates for their high GPAs and willingness to coach their peers (at seemingly any hour). Despite the grueling hours expected of an investment banker, Columbia Business School’s Karl Blunden, 30, was known for his involvement in campus life, winning the school’s distinguished scholarship and outstanding service awards. And Northwestern’s Meera Atkins, 42, worked tirelessly as an ambassador for the program.

Of course, several students brought colorful backgrounds to the table. The University of Florida’s Jonathan Tenanbaum, 38, has gone from hip hop artist to attorney to MBA. IE Business School’s Dulce Altabella Lazzi, 43, completed the New York Marathon while pregnant (unknowingly).

From six sigma disciples to social do-gooders, these standout EMBAs bear watching in the coming years. Here is a little more about eight of the people that made this year’s cohort of top executive MBAs.

How this MBA racked up an incredible $350,000 in student debt

(Poets&Quants) — For Kellogg MBA Cacky Calderon, far more is at stake than money when it comes to paying off her staggering student debt. And staggering it is: Calderon earned an MBA and a law degree simultaneously from Northwestern University. Both the Kellogg School of Management and law school are among the most highly selective schools in the nation.

She was paying tuition of around $70,000 a year and came out of school with $350,000 in student loans–more than triple the average debt piled up by Kellogg MBAs. The sooner she’s out of debt, the sooner she can launch her startup, an enterprise rooted in profound personal loss, and focused on improving the lives of cancer victims and their loved ones.

After graduating last year, Calderon has been paying down her debt with all she can save, plus her bonuses from TripAdvisor, where she’s a product manager. “I just put every penny into paying back these loans as fast as possible,” says Calderon, 31, who had spent four-and-a-half years at Amazon after receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 2005. “I’ve lived the most frugal life in order to get this thing paid off fast.”

Calderon had taken out federal Graduate PLUS and Stafford student loans for her Northwestern education, then refinanced with SoFi, a disruptive San Francisco firm founded in 2011 that’s approaching $2.5 billion in refinanced loans. The refinancing gave her an interest rate of 6.4% on a fixed-rate, 15-year term, delivering significant interest savings over her federal loans, which ranged from around 5% to 7.9%, but were compounding.

And now, thanks to a contest SoFi announced to celebrate reaching $2 billion in refinancing, Calderon has a chance to have her entire loan paid off at once. The firm’s #2BillionTogether contest for SoFi clients required a short essay for entry, describing how refinancing affected the contestant’s life, and how the grand prize—total payoff of their SoFi student debt—would allow them to achieve their career dreams. More than 2,400 entries came in. SoFi staff and management narrowed the list down, based on the essays, to 20 semifinalists, including Calderon.

Public voting, which closes at 11:59 p.m. on June 23, will determine the winner. “There’s a guy with an incredible network in first place,” Calderon says. “It’s a heated race, we’re all trying to catch up to him, or at least crack the top five.”

At 6 p.m. EST on June 22, Calderon had 2,786 votes, putting her at No. 6, while the leader, an NYU Law graduate, had 10,627.

SoFi’s management has been “blown away” by the response to the #2BillionTogether contest, says chief marketing officer Aimee Young. The essays submitted by the 2,400 entrants were both touching and revelatory, she says. “What we found was how crippling student debt can be even for folks who graduate with their MBAs or from law school,” Young says. “They said things like, ‘I haven’t gotten married yet’ or ‘My spouse and I are waiting to have kids until we don’t have this tremendous burden.’”

Because the contest produced such strong participation among SoFi borrowers, the company decided to add four runner-up prizes, the substance of which will remain secret until the grand prize winner and runners up are announced on July 1, Young says.

For Calderon, the SoFi prize would allow her to launch a startup, an idea that was born after her mother Wanda died of stomach cancer in 2007. Calderon had been a primary caretaker for her mother when she was sick. “I tried to feed her. You have this sick mom, and she’s going to chemo, and she has to eat something, and everything tastes terrible. She just couldn’t eat, wouldn’t eat,” Calderon says.

The loss of appetite and the subsequent deterioration of the body’s muscle mass have a powerful impact on cancer patients’ condition and length of life. But the clinical relevance is often overlooked, according to a 2005 report in the journal Nature Clinical Practice Oncology, which also notes that optimal therapy should combine dietary changes with drug therapy.

From watching her mother rapidly weaken and diminish until her death at age 58, Calderon grew determined to find a solution to cancer patients’ food and nutrition problems.

“The issue is that you know how to feed your family, now. You know what their preferences are. When someone has chemotherapy, everything changes,” Calderon says. “Not only is their appetite dramatically lower, but the way food should or could taste … is completely different. Imagine if you ate some pasta and it tasted like metal.”

Calderon teamed up with her best friend from growing in Seattle, Paige Stoll, founder of a company that prepares and delivers organic baby food. For Calderon’s budding enterprise, Palate Love Care, she and Stoll are delivering meals to a few cancer patients in Seattle. Through research and consultation with nutritionists, they develop dishes, and test them and re-test them with patients. So far, Stoll’s spinach souffle is a winner.

But Calderon is aiming to turn the venture into a nationwide company, shipping flash-frozen nutritious meals to cancer patients via online ordering; a cancer-care version of Plated or HelloFresh, but with ready-made meals instead of assemble-yourself sets of recipe ingredients, she says.

“I want to scale this,” Calderon says. “You can’t really do that with $3,000 a month in student loan payments.”

Calderon obtained a law degree “to learn how to think,” and an MBA to learn how to run a company, she says. At Kellogg, a class in pitching to venture capitalists provided important information to use in the future, and validated her belief that she could raise startup funds. “I really realized, ‘Yeah, I could do this,’” she says. She also made good use of Kellogg’s introductory strategy class. “There’s just a lot of great thinking that goes on in that class,” she says. “I had a business undergraduate degree, so it was really nice to think about applying what I knew.”

The cost, and debt, of a dual-degree education at Northwestern didn’t scare her off, she says. “I figured I would pay it back the way everybody else is paying it back: work really hard and save every penny.”

Calderon plans to officially launch Palate Love Care and devote herself to it full time as soon as she unburdens herself from her student loans, whether that happens this year, with a SoFi contest win, or later, after she pays the debt off herself. She wants to give families across the country the ability to do what she tried so hard to do for her mother.

Foreign B-school grads left out in the cold in U.S. job market

(Poets&Quants) — No question, Sudhanshu Shekhar was an all-star student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He was on the dean’s list. He was elected partner in the school’s consulting club, selected as vice president of the operations management club, and held membership in four other student groups. He won a Best Buy marketing strategy challenge and presented his recommendations to the firm’s C-suite. He leveraged a summer internship with Booz & Company into a post-graduation job with Pricewaterhouse Coopers after PwC acquired Booz and turned it into Strategy&.

The 28-year-old Shekhar had come to the U.S. from India to obtain an MBA from a top school, secure a high-level consulting job, and make an impact on global business practices. “If you work in India, you can only influence India. That’s not what I came here for,” says Shekhar. “I came here … to maybe influence the strategy of the whole world.”

Until this spring, it appeared he was well on his way. But now, Shekhar, who graduated from Kellogg with an MBA last year, is about to leave the U.S. in frustration, the victim of a controversial, lottery-based work-visa program that puts international MBAs in the same category as foreign mid-level IT workers accused of taking jobs from Americans.

Like many international students who come to an American school for an MBA, Shekhar had hoped to land a job that would allow him to stay and work in the U.S. But Shekhar did not win the H-1B visa lottery that this year saw 233,000 applications for only 85,000 of the “specialty occupation” visas for foreign nationals with bachelor’s degrees or higher. Instead, Shekhar will be leaving for Amsterdam to start work for Strategy&, as soon as his Dutch work permit comes through.

“It’s been frustrating, I will be honest,” he concedes.“I learned everything in the U.S. I should add value to the economy of the U.S.” His student work visa, which allows 12 months of employment during or after schooling, has just expired. “I can only stay in the U.S. for 60 days and then I cannot even stay, I have to go out. It’s two months of no work, which is not great.”

American business schools don’t tend to highlight potential visa problems for international MBAs, but applicants should do the research on the odds, Shekhar says. “If anybody comes to the U.S. thinking it’s a 100% surety that they’re going to get an H-1B, they’re stupid and they shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place. You can get unlucky, and you have to prepare for that.”

Friends of Shekhar’s who had graduated from Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business also failed to obtain an H-1B, he says. “None of those guys ever planned on not getting it, and some of them are in a bigger soup than I am,” Shekhar says.

It’s difficult to say what percentage of international students who want to work and live in the U.S. with their MBAs are unable to do so, but a recent Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) report of MBA employers suggests it is a significant problem.

For foreign MBA grads, a harsh American job market

Only 28% of the employers who plan to hire MBAs in the U.S. this year expect to hire international candidates, according to a study released last month by GMAC. Another 25% said they have no objection to foreign hires but had no specific plans to make an offer to anyone from outside the U.S. Worse, 47% of the companies hiring MBAs this year in the U.S. said flatly they would not employ international graduates.

Many of the companies that refuse to consider foreign-born MBAs told GMAC that international hires cost too much, require time-consuming paperwork and documentation, face a limited supply of visas, and often pose language barriers and an additional investment of time in the hiring process. Companies also cited concerns related to security clearances and cultural differences to explain their refusal to hire international MBAs.

For international students who attend European business schools, the situation is even worse. GMAC found that even fewer firms—just 23%—plan to offer a job to an international MBA graduate. But the challenges loom larger in the U.S. because of the much greater number of international students enrolled in American business schools.

An oversubscribed path to employment

The H-1B is the work visa used by the vast majority of international MBA graduates from U.S. schools. The visa provides work authorization for up to three years, and after three years can be renewed for another three. Employers apply on behalf of employees, and applications have risen sharply over the past three years, but the number of available visas has remained the same.

When American business schools enrolled fewer international students, it was less of a problem. But as U.S. MBA programs have admitted larger and larger numbers of students from outside the U.S. to increase diversity and bring more of a global mindset into the classroom, getting jobs for those graduates has become a more troublesome issue.

The vast majority of international students apply to U.S. schools because they hope and want a job in the U.S. GMAC research shows that 87% of all foreign students studying in American graduate management programs intend to seek work in the U.S. after graduation.

However, the H-1B visa has become a political hot potato, with critics alleging massive abuse by firms seeking to replace American workers with lower-paid foreign employees, and two prominent companies—Disney and Southern California Edison—this year reported to have forced U.S. workers to train their foreign replacements before American workers were laid off.

For foreign nationals wishing to work in the U.S., getting an American MBA comes with a severe risk: those who fail to get work visas may end up back in their native countries, earning a much lower salary than they would have in the U.S. and owing a lot of money in student debt.

At Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, for example, the visa problem has prevented a “considerable” percentage of foreign MBA graduates from pursuing their aspirations of working in the U.S., says Read McNamara, managing director of the school’s careers center.

Seeking refuge in Canada

This year’s lotteries were a win-lose-lose for two Stanford MBA entrepreneurs. Belgian Pierre-Jean “PJ” Cobut and Israeli Elad Ferber started a medical device company while at Stanford’s business school. They’ve raised $1.6 million in seed funding, have fully functioning prototypes, and are eyeing several attractive markets. But their next stop may be Canada—Cobut received an H-1B visa in this year’s lottery but Ferber did not.

“It makes zero sense,” Cobut says. “Every economist will tell you that economic growth comes from small companies. We’re growing the company, we’re paying taxes, what’s there not to like?”

Cobut and Ferber met at Stanford and developed Echo Labs with considerable help from the school’s entrepreneurship programs and the Stanford-linked startup accelerator StartX. Echo Labs will produce wearable health care devices that use light-based sensors to analyze an individual’s vital signs such as blood pressure and heart rate, and body states such as levels of oxygen and CO2 in the blood. Applications include athletic training and remote health and body monitoring. Potential clients include carmakers seeking systems that identify driver drowsiness, medical care providers who want to be able to assess patients from a distance, and insurance companies aiming to base premiums on real-time health indicators.

Ferber will soon apply for two other U.S. visas, the 0-1 and EB-1, which are issued to people with proven “extraordinary” potential—not necessarily a verifiable quality for a new entrepreneur, no matter how bright and talented. Ferber’s student visa runs out at the end of June. If he doesn’t get a work visa, he and Cobut will have to move the company outside the U.S., possibly to Canada, because it wouldn’t be possible for the company to operate effectively with the founders in different nations, Cobut says.

Canada has put in place a “startup visa” and has aggressively promoted it to failed U.S. H-1B applicants—most dramatically by putting up a billboard ad along the freeway between the San Francisco airport and Silicon Valley in 2013. “H-1B Problems?” the billboard read. “PIVOT to CANADA.”

Dealing with disappointment

For many who come to the U.S. with dreams of earning an MBA, long-term employment in America is at least a struggle, if not an impossibility. Kellogg’s Shekhar is a prime example. He had worked as an intern in the U.S. in 2007, researching enzymatic biofuel cells at Saint Louis University for a summer while getting a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.

Straight out of his undergraduate program, he landed at Procter & Gamble in India as an associate manager for product supply, was promoted to manager after two years, and worked for the company for another two years, in India and at corporate headquarters in Cincinnati.

Set on a future career in consulting, he began applying to elite U.S. MBA programs. “Harvard and Stanford I applied to because everybody applies,” he says. He also completed applications for the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and Kellogg. Shekhar built a spreadsheet showing how long it would take to pay off student loans from each school, which helped narrow his first and second choices to Harvard and Kellogg, both known for preparing students well for high-level consulting careers.

Shekhar was accepted to both Stanford and Kellogg. He chose Kellogg, partly because he wasn’t interested in the heavy tech focus at Stanford and also because Kellogg staff were extremely helpful and responsive, he says. “I knew that Stanford had a better ranking, but I didn’t get that love,” Shekhar says.

At Kellogg, Shekhar’s class was composed of 36% international students. When the H-1B lottery results began to come in, he was left out in the cold. “Everybody from Kellogg who graduated with me, they were like, ‘I got my H-1B, I got my H-1B.’ I still hadn’t heard back. That’s when you start getting nervous. That’s when I started networking for the possibility that I would not get it.”

To be sure, Shekhar sees a silver lining around the dark cloud the H-1B lottery has cast over his budding consulting career. His employer has agreed to bring him back to the U.S. after a year in Amsterdam, and a year of overseas work for a U.S. company will mean he can come back essentially on a rubber-stamp visa.”It will be, in the long-term, helpful,” he says. “I will have a year of European experience … and a year of U.S. experience. It will be a great addition to my resume, but the process of getting it is frustrating.”

The business schools winning the student talent wars

(Poets&Quants) — Every year, the world’s top business schools engage in an all-out talent war for the best MBA applicants on the market. To coax the most desirable prospects to their campuses, they’ve employed alumni to serve as ambassadors, touted their programs and faculty, and used millions of dollars in scholarship money.

So, who’s winning the MBA student talent wars? A new survey of MBA admission consultants by Poets&Quants finds some very familiar business schools at the top, with some real surprises sprinkled throughout the list. Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business ekes out a slight win over Harvard Business School, while the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is solidly third.

Perhaps more surprising is that admission consultants believe that two non-U.S. business schools, INSEAD and London Business School, are among the top 10 in the world for landing the best candidates in the MBA applicant pool. In fact, INSEAD comes in fourth, just ahead of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. London Business School is tied for eighth with Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Rounding out the top 10 are Columbia Business School, which placed seventh, and MIT Sloan, which came in tenth.

The findings offer a unique, never-before-seen look at the student talent wars. Aside from admission officials, MBA admissions consultants are in the best position to assess the total candidate, and they typically see a quarter to a third of the applicant pool of the Top 10 business schools. Some rankings measure student quality using average GMAT scores or undergraduate GPAs. But those numbers take a very limited view of quality. They fail to take into account where candidates earned their degrees, where they worked, what they did, what progress they made in their jobs, what leadership challenges they overcome, and how articulate and thoughtful they are.

In effect, we asked admission consultants to take a holistic view of their clients in answering this simple question: “To which schools have you seen your highest quality clients enroll over the years?” We then asked the consultants to rate the top 25 U.S. business schools and the top 10 non-U.S. schools on a scale of one-to-five, with five representing schools that enrolled the highest quality students.

The survey was sent in May to 50 leading MBA admission consultants at the world’s top firms and boutiques. Some 35 of the 50 consulting firms completed Poets&Quants’ survey, for a response rate of 70%. Altogether, the survey respondents—many of them former business school admissions officials themselves—have accumulated well over 400 years of admissions consulting experience and helped more than 65,000 applicants get into the world’s best MBA programs.

The survey’s limitations are obvious. We only asked for consultants’ views of 35 schools, already a highly selective group of MBA programs that are generally recognized as the best in the world. These schools, no matter where they rank on this list, are solidly in the top 1% of all providers of graduate business education. Secondly, the ranking is not reflective of the quality of the MBA experience, the faculty, the alumni network, or even such basic career outcomes as starting salaries and employment—all important aspects of a world-class MBA program. Instead, the ranking merely measures which schools are successfully and consistently getting the best and brightest student talent, from the perspective of admissions consultants.

Stanford’s No. 1 showing is largely attributed to the increased interest in entrepreneurship and technology as well as the school’s highly selective acceptance rate of only 7.1%, versus 11.0% at Harvard. Because Stanford only has to fill 410 seats, less than half the 935 at HBS, consultants say it is more likely to win the MBA talent war overall. That’s despite the fact that Harvard boasts considerably greater resources than Stanford, more faculty, including far more star professors, a wider portfolio of courses, and a much larger and more global alumni network, including significantly more corporate CEOs.

The fact that it topped HBS, even ever so slightly, was not an unexpected outcome.

“I’m not surprised to see [Stanford] GSB top HBS on this list, just because Stanford seems to be edging Harvard on most lists,” says Adam Hoff, a principal with Amerasia Consulting Group. “We’re in a world that seems to turn on the wheel of Silicon Valley, a focus on social impact, a brogues and chinos vibe over suits and wing tips. I know that among my clients who got into both, most choose Stanford. That said, I still have far more people who go into this process with HBS as their top choice and who don’t even apply to Stanford than I do the opposite.”

And at least one consultant attributed Stanford’s success to its admissions practices. “When Stanford makes an offer, not only does [MBA Admissions Director] Derrick [Bolton] make the calls personally and starts selling the school, they almost immediately engage alumni in the candidate’s industry and/or location to start selling the candidate on the benefits of choosing GSB over HBS,” says Chris Aitken, co-founder of MBA Prep School. “I don’t think HBS gives the impression of working as hard to win top tier candidates over.”

The real surprise may well be INSEAD’s showing above many so-called M7 schools, generally thought to have the best MBA programs in the world. The school, with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore, has an acceptance rate (estimated at just above 30%) that is well above rivals and an average GMAT score for its incoming class that, at 701, is below 14 U.S. MBA programs. But INSEAD’s more global makeup and its shorter one-year program has appeal to many of the best candidates in the applicant pool.

Hoff of Amerasia also believes INSEAD gets better candidates by having a robust set of essay questions and requiring candidates to go through two interviews. “The school gets better candidates by asking them to complete a tough application process,” he insists. “You get what you pay for. U.S. schools would be wise to stop pandering to this supposed Twitter generation and go back to tougher apps. They will not only get a better sense of what they have, but they will be signaling that getting into their school is no joke. I know for a fact that some of my clients come through this process thinking of INSEAD as more legitimate than counterpart schools simply because it was such a robust application process.”

The survey results also reflect, to some degree, the general reputations of the schools and how they rank on various lists. Typically, says Dan Bauer, founder and CEO of The MBA Exchange, the best applicants are deciding on which schools to attend based on “a school’s relative ranking, fit between curriculum and post-MBA career goals, appeal of campus culture, offers of merit-based aid, and geographic location.”

The very best MBA applicants may also factor in other things in making their choice. “Schools that are more popular with applicants as a whole, and [with] top applicants in particular, are going to be the ones that admissions consultants’ top quality candidates enroll in,” contends Adam Markus, a veteran MBA consultant. “For U.S. schools, Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton are clearly at the top and the others are listed reasonably well in first choice ranking. Stanford is slightly ahead of HBS because Stanford takes a much narrower band of high quality applicants than HBS does.”

Markus also believes that many of the best candidates heavily factor into their decisions the opportunity cost of attending an MBA program. “In general,” he says, “higher quality candidates have much greater opportunity costs for stopping work for one to two years to go get an MBA and will consider a relatively narrow range of programs.

“I have some high quality clients who only apply to HBS and Stanford and would consider even Wharton an unacceptable compromise. I have some candidates who will add Wharton to the list, but that is about it.”

Matt Symonds, a partner at Fortuna Admissions, says that the applicant pools at the top three schools—Stanford, Harvard and Wharton—are so deep and rich that it’s often hard to discern a significant difference in candidate quality at many other highly selective MBA programs. “For every applicant that secured a place at [Stanford] GSB, Harvard, or Wharton, there were no doubt two or three other applicants of equal quality that did not make the cut because the admissions office was trying to put together a diverse class,” adds Symonds. “There are only so many McKinsey, Google, World Bank, Gates Foundation, or boutique private equity profiles each school will admit, and those applicants may land a place at Haas, Kellogg, or Tuck. So the margins are very thin.”

The most important lessons for graduating MBAs

That’s how most MBAs feel after graduation. Just ask them about their first day at school. The consensus: It was pretty intimidating. For starters, cranking out 70-hour work weeks didn’t prep them for the workload. Running at the speed of business was a gear short of B-school pace, apparently. As first years, they were deluged with choices, where every club and event was a chance to make an impact – or miss out.

But the biggest lesson? Often, it was the humbling realization that they weren’t the most gifted or accomplished member of their class. Their peers were also valedictorians who had been showered with accolades and promotions, many prevailing over heartbreaking hardships in the process. In the end, the MBAs who excelled were the ones who quickly embraced their peers. “Everyone’s experience gives them something incredibly valuable to offer in the discussion of virtually any topic,” says Ali Huberlie, a 2015 graduate from Harvard Business School. “And every single person listening can learn something from each and every other person.”

This spring, Poets&Quants honored 50 of the most distinguished MBAs from the Class of 2015. As part of the nomination process, we asked students to share the key lessons they gained during business school. Learning how to lead was among the most transformational experiences for these MBAs. “Being a true leader isn’t about being a person with the loudest voice or holding power for yourself,” wrote London Business School’s Anne-Marie Kruk. “Being a great leader involves patience, delegation, and a great amount of teamwork.”

At the same time, these MBAs discovered that mastering various principles and processes was teaching them something deeper. “Hard skills are important and useful, but perishable,” observes Jenny Dare Paulin from University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “The most important skills you can acquire in business school are the abilities to adapt, interpret, and learn.” Even more, many discovered the simple recipe for learning, which was succinctly summed up by MIT Sloan’s Liat Kaver: “Don’t be shy to ask for help!”

Here is more advice from some of the best of the Class of 2015:

Data drives decisions

“I’ve learned that decision-making as a leader is both an art and a science. While it’s critical to gather hard data and input from those around you whenever possible, there’s never a perfect answer. Knowing when to make a call, and when to bring more people and data into the discussion, is an art. My biggest area of growth as a leader was becoming comfortable with this balance between the art and science.” — Nikita Mitchell, University of California-Berkeley, Haas School of Business

“The biggest lesson I gained was reaching a new level of confidence in my ability to make a decision with limited information. Prior to business school, I had a lot of experience with analyzing situations, weighing the pros and cons of each option, and even making the ultimate decisions. However, business school took my skills to the next level and taught me how to take all of the data available, make calculated assumptions, weigh the potential outcomes and consequences, then execute, pivot if need be, and live with (and learn from) the results. These decision-making skills will be very important when major high stakes situations present themselves in the business world, and a misstep could easily result in multi-million dollar consequences.” — George Wilson, Columbia Business School

Take risks

“The biggest lesson I learned from business school is that different is great. For me, this story began when I chose to [pursue] the Johnson Cornell Tech MBA in lieu of a traditional business program. While my friends and family saw the new program as a risk, I saw it as an opportunity. And by deciding to do something different, I got to build new companies, create change in community engagement and knowledge sharing, and shape how academic curriculum should change. I got to learn from David Tisch, Greg Pass, and Jonah Berger on how to manage products and ideas. I got to meet lifelong friends, who will be the next Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. I got to do great things, because I decided to do something different. I learned that there is always something we can learn from the people around us, so ask questions and be open to challenge. Know that there is no black or white.” — Miwa Takaki, Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School of Management

“I learned that I am more capable than I ever thought possible. While at Ross, I took multiple risks and learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I tried new classes, traveled to new places, worked in different cultures, and actively pursued leadership opportunities outside of my comfort zone. Each experience helped me gain confidence in my abilities and encouraged me to pursue new challenges.” — Audrey Horn, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

Execution matters

“The difference between great ideas and great change is execution, and being the person who executes is just as important and fulfilling as the being the ideator. In everything I got involved in at Haas, I realized that I am a great executor. Though on the surface, being an executor isn’t as sexy as being an ideator, my time at Haas has taught me that change won’t happen unless there’s someone pushing things along. I learned to be proud of the fact that I can execute well and that creativity isn’t just about how many new ideas you have, but also about how many new ways you can make them happen.” — Katie Benintende, University of California-Berkeley, Haas School of Business

Learn from your mistakes

“Projects may succeed or fail, however the greatest value is in what you learn and can apply to the next one.” — Ellen Gartner Phillips, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business

Leadership comes in many forms

“As a student leader, I was confronted with many unexpected challenges, some of which were personally sensitive to my peers and me. Throughout my business school experience, I worked on becoming the most … supportive leader I could be. I recognized that in order to be effective I needed to listen, understand, and appreciate the concerns that were brought to my attention. Everyone interprets life events and conflict differently. What may personally move me may have little or no impact on the next person. As a leader, how I perceived the importance of an issue is somewhat irrelevant in making sure that the person I am interacting with is heard and assisted in the fairest way possible. I learned that objectivity and acceptance are incredibly important. Everyone has the right to enjoy their experience equally and no one has the right to diminish another’s experience. My experience showed me that I don’t need to compromise on my values to be effective.” — Alexander Brown, Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business

Don’t underestimate networking

“The biggest lesson I gained from my time at Mays is what that overused, ambiguous phrase “Your network is your net worth” really means and how to use it. The Aggie Network is over 300,000 strong and, although that can seem intimidating, leveraging the right contacts appropriately can make a significant difference in outcomes—a job interview, a critical data point, etc. Also, I’ve learned not to reach out to my network only when I need something but to foster those relationships on a personal level as well.” — Robyn Peters, Texas A&M University, Mays Business School

Soft skills often trump hard skills

“It’s all about empathy. The best teachers, innovators, leaders, negotiators, marketers, managers, facilitators, sellers, they all excel at deeply understanding other people’s needs and motivations. I truly believe that empathy is the most underestimated and overlooked leadership skill.” — Elena Mendez Escobar, MIT Sloan School of Management

“Core skill building aside, the biggest lesson from business school has been realizing the importance of emotional intelligence to becoming a leader. This concept was emphasized [in] class after class and through speaker series and many esteemed campus guests. Some of the most critical skills of a good business leader are [the] ability to self-motivate, self-manage, and be empathetic. Other skills … will make someone a good risk officer or brand manager. But the truly exceptional leaders are those who are able to inspire and drive teams and organizations to success.” — Nadine Payne, University of Maryland, Smith School of Business

There’s more to business than the bottom line

“Business is about generating value, which can come in many forms—economic growth, infrastructure improvement, employment opportunity, engineering innovation, or greater community interaction, to name a few. It can serve as an incubator for community development and, for post-conflict societies in particular, business can expedite the transition to stability.” — Elizabeth Owens, University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business

Take nothing for granted

“Two words, in bright block letters, on my laptop wallpaper: ‘Hustle harder.’ For me, pursuing a niche path in healthcare management meant that I had to be a part of the community, networking with alumni and other professionals, and diving into academic and practical learning opportunities. With no healthcare experience prior to business school, I pursued two independent studies in palliative care and home health and secured an internship at one of the nation’s leading hospitals. I drank a lot of coffee, meeting health care professionals early in the morning as often as I could. I knew that I would have to work hard academically, but I learned that the hustle extended far beyond the classroom. You have to stay hungry.” — Gina Bruno, Vanderbilt University, Owen Graduate School of Management

Why MBAs are becoming less important

As business schools strive to stay relevant while they compete with Silicon Valley for new recruits, here’s one more reason not to go: Your boss might not make you.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal this week, some private-equity firms, which historically required entry-level employees to leave after their first few years to go get a MBA, are now dropping that policy. The article cites Chicago-based private-equity firm GTCR, which will soon begin promoting deserving associates even if they don’t have a graduate degree in business — something that was formerly a prerequisite to advancing in the firm.

Besides skepticism over how much an MBA really enhances someone’s skill set, the policy changes are apparently motivated by the soaring cost of going to b-school, which can put you out $1 million, according to the Journal. Top business school tuition — nearly $100,000 a year at Harvard and Stanford — plus giving up a private-equity job (which apparently pays as much as $300,000 or more annually) while working on the degree, can mean parting with a seven figure sum.

Other private-equity firms, such as KKR & Co. KKR, Blackstone Group BX, Apollo Global Management APO and Silver Lake, also have “flexible” policies on MBAs, the newspaper says, quoting recruiting firm Long Ridge Partners’ Michael Goodman: “Over the past decade or 15 years it’s gone from a must-have to a nice-to-have.”

Even rising to the CEO job may no longer require a MBA. Neither of Blackstone’s heads of its private-equity and real-estate divisions — potential successors to CEO Stephen Schwarzman — have the degree. Nor does KKR’s heir apparent Scott Nuttall.

In an earlier interview with the Journal in March, Schwarzman said that in some cases, an employee is “such a natural athlete,” b-school wouldn’t do them much good. They can “use the firm as their university,” he said.

Still, advanced business degrees are common in the corner office. Seven or eight senior partners at GTCR have MBAs, although the degrees are less common in lower tiers of the firm.

The cost of an MBA in Europe has plummeted, thanks to a strong dollar

(Poets&Quants) — Add one more upside to the European MBA for U.S. students. Already, MBA programs in Europe offer an advantage to many students in their typical one-year length, cutting tuition along with opportunity costs. And the top European B-schools tend to accept higher percentages of applicants with lower GMAT scores than highly ranked U.S. schools.

Over the past year, the strength of the U.S. dollar versus the euro has drastically discounted the price of a European international MBA, and led, school officials say, to increased interest from American would-be MBAs. The euro has plunged from a high of around 1.4 dollars per euro in May 2014 to 1.1 now, making it 21% cheaper for students who use dollars to pay European MBA tuition.

INSEAD’s current tuition of 65,800 euros costs $71,557 in dollars – but if the euro hadn’t fallen since this time last year, that price would have been $89,488. Of course, the true savings are even greater when you add in the estimated living expenses of 23,800 euros that come with getting an MBA on INSEAD’s Fontainebleau campus in France. That’s $7,140 less expensive than only a year ago.

The price differential is less consequential for U.S. students who enroll at schools in Britain. That’s because the United Kingdom government never adopted the euro and kept its own currency, the pound sterling, which hasn’t suffered as significant a fall against the U.S. dollar in the past year. The price break is less than half in the U.K., at 9.8%. At London Business School, for example, tuition for a student starting in its two-year MBA program this August is 67,750 British pounds, or $103,895. A year ago, it would have cost about $10,000 more, or $113,892. And 10 years ago, the same tuition would have been $123,603.

Cambridge and Oxford, which both have 12-month-long MBA programs are less expensive. At the University of Cambridge’s Business School, the tuition of 44,960 British pounds comes to $68,841 versus $75,580 a year ago, while at Oxford University’s Said Business School, the price tag for an MBA is 47,925 pounds, or $73,381 now, compared to $80,565 just 12 months earlier.

But the biggest discounts occur elsewhere in Europe. At Vlerick Business School in Belgium, the currency differential has cut tuition to $39,960 for this year, from $51,060 in 2014. The cost of Catolica Lisbon’s MBA has fallen to $37,800 from 2014’s $48,300. In Germany, the European School of Management and Technology’s international MBA price has dropped to $31,320 from $40,020.

“What we are already seeing is … that more U.S. people will apply and will come to Europe,” says Filip Roodhooft, research dean and MBA program instructor at Vlerick.

Vlerick’s recent move to Brussels from Leuven likely played a major role in the more than doubling of U.S. applications to the school over the past year, but the dollar’s strength probably played a part, Roodhooft says. Applicants always mention that “this currency effect has an important impact,” Roodhooft says.

There were only three American students in Vlerick’s MBA class of 2014, out of 43 students from 21 countries. But in light of the strong dollar, Vlerick has ratcheted up its U.S. recruiting via aggressive online marketing, Roodhooft says.

While many American students who earn MBAs in Europe continue working there or elsewhere overseas afterward, considerable numbers return to the U.S. From INSEAD’s MBA class of 2013, for example, 36% of 73 U.S. students—about 7% of the class—returned to the U.S. for jobs after graduating, the same proportion as in 2010.

The number of American students at leading European schools varies widely. At the Rotterdam School of Management, there were 10 Americans out of 140 students in the MBA class of 2014.

Students from North America made up 18% of IE’s MBA class of 2014. According to the school’s careers report, 35% of those in the class who obtained jobs went to work in Europe, 28% in Latin America, 12% in Asia, and 12% in North America.

The career paths of HEC Paris’ MBA graduates offer a window into the European job market. Ninety per cent of 2014 MBAs were employed within three months after graduation. Half stayed in Europe. More than half went into industry, with tech companies taking 20% of the employed members of the class. Only 15% went into finance, a drop from the typical 20%, due to the weakness of that sector in Europe. The school’s careers report cites more interest from American firms. “As the U.S. economy continues to improve, we see more and more U.S.-based companies looking to increase recruiting in Europe and beyond,” the report says.

INSEAD administrators have yet to see a rise in applications from U.S. students – but interest is clearly perking up, as indicated by the numbers of Americans attending marketing events in the U.S., says Virginie Fougea, associate admissions director for degree programs. “We’ve seen great attendance … a noticeable change in attendance,” Fougea says.

Fougea notes that for would-be MBAs, it typically takes two years between considering the degree and applying to schools. INSEAD administrators expect they will “most likely” receive increased applications from U.S. students if the currency differential remains or widens, as applicants commit to applying for an MBA.

To be sure, a falling euro alone is not going to make U.S. residents fall all over themselves to get an MBA in Europe. “The Eurozone is also facing some larger scale macro level labor force issues which can make it a difficult environment for international job seekers, MBA or not,” says Bhavik Trivedi, managing partner of Critical Square admissions consulting. “So there’s more to consider than just the length and the money—in-nation trends are pretty important, too.”

In any case, American MBAs who choose to stay in Europe will likely be paid in euros, a potential problem for people considering a return to the U.S. Most top European programs have been reporting fairly stagnant starting salary growth over the past three years. INSEAD graduates, from 2009 to 2013, found starting salary figures up slightly in Germany and France but down steeply in Switzerland. For 2013 grads, the median salary in Germany was 96,000 euros, or about $128,000 at the time. However, that salary, if paid in euros today, would be worth only $104,000. A 2013 INSEAD grad staying in France to work for the median salary of 82,800 euros would have been making $110,000 initially, but, minus any raises, about $90,000 now.

Critical Square doesn’t advise clients on the currency issue unless they ask, Trivedi says. “We strongly believe where they want to be, where they want to work, and what they want out of the experience are a higher level concern. But if folks are interested in a European MBA, then the currency drop definitely doesn’t hurt.”

Getting an MBA in Europe makes de facto sense for U.S. residents who want to work in Europe. But a European MBA can propel graduates to other international destinations, points out Jon Frank, CEO of Admissionado admissions consultants. “European schools tend to be more global than U.S. schools, even beyond their obvious strength in Europe,” Frank says. “[People] interested in Singapore, Lagos, Dubai, Hong Kong, etc. could gain a great deal by targeting European schools.”

At the same time, graduation from elite U.S. MBA programs also opens up opportunities all over the world for people who want to work internationally, Frank notes. “This is why we stand behind our simple advice, to go to the best school you can get into,” Frank says.

While top European MBA programs such as INSEAD and HEC Paris are well regarded and have fairly strong alumni networks in the U.S., graduates from U.S. programs have, in general, an edge in the job market over those from European programs, Frank says. “Firms that come recruiting at MBA programs can have a somewhat local bias. This becomes increasingly true as you exit the most elite programs, and enter second-tier and third-tier programs. Local alumni networks are quite powerful.”

And Frank believes that with the bedrock price difference between one-year European MBA degrees and two-year U.S. degrees, currency fluctuations have a relatively limited impact.

Congrats, MBA grads! You’re getting a $45,000 raise

Graduation season is nearly over for university students. For those walking across the stage, all that pomp and circumstance is accompanied by a pressing, stress-inducing question: what kind of salary will this degree (and all this debt) earn me?

The Graduate Management Admission Council, the organization that administers the GMAT, has an answer for MBA graduates. They’ll make more this year than they did last year. That’s right, MBA grads are getting a raise.

The Council’s 2015 survey of corporate recruiters found that, globally, more than half of employers will increase starting salaries for new MBA hires in 2015. Thirty percent of employers will give raises equal to the rate of inflation; 21% of employers will increase starting salaries by even more than that.

The expected median starting salary for recent MBA graduates in the United States will be $100,000 this year. That’s an increase of $5,000 from last year’s salaries and a $45,000 advantage over what survey respondents are paying candidates with bachelor’s degrees. (The Council pegs the starting salary for graduates with a bachelor’s degree at $55,000, based on its survey of corporate recruiters. By comparison, the National Association of Colleges and Employers says the starting salary for bachelor’s degree earners in the class of 2014 was $48,127.)

There’s more good news for MBA grads. Their overall job prospects are the best they’ve been in more than a decade, with 84% of respondents saying they plan to hire MBA graduates this year, up from 74% last year.